Trie partitioning in distributed PC based routers

Abstract

Abstract-Recent research in PC based routers has proposed a distributed architecture. Such an architecture poses several challenges in the areas of scalability, robustness, efficiency of routing, latency and other issues. We examine the issue of decrease in throughput due to large routing tables in this architecture and propose partitioning as a solution. Our contribution is twofold: defining the concept of load for a node in a forwarding table trie and to show by simulation experiments the effectiveness of partitioning and its application to a distributed router.

Implementation of WFQ in a distributed open software router

“…Routebricks [9] defines an architecture that parallelizes the packet forwarding functionality across multiple PCs and across multiple cores of the CPUs within each PC. A technique to improve performance of a distributed OSR was studied in [2]. Thus considerable research effort has been devoted to analyzing and improving the performance of OSRs in both a single PC and in distributed configurations.…”

“…However, implementing WFQ in a distributed system such as the STSDR has several challenges. In our STSDR implementation, we observed that a lot of computing power was left over after implementing basic routing functionality [2], [11]. Hence we choose to implement WFQ to take advantage of the available computing capacity in the STSDR.…”

“…We are therefore interested in incorporating the implementation of such a functionality in a distributed architecture. The distributed OSR design considered in this paper is the 'Switched Two-stage Distributed Router' (STSDR) [2] shown in Figure 1. The STSDR has two stages; a load balancing stage and a packet forwarding stage.…”